Earlier this year, Emancipate NC submitted an amicus brief, authored by Dawn Blagrove and Ian Mance, to educate the North Carolina Supreme Court about the racial justice consequences of Juvenile Life Without Parole.
On Wednesday, November 10, 2021, at 10:45 a.m., Dawn Blagrove will present an oral argument in the case, State v. Darrell Tristan Anderson.
Darrell Tristan Anderson is a Black man who was sentenced to an extreme term of incarceration for a crime that he committed when he was only a 17-year-old child. While he is technically an individual with parole eligibility, the earliest age that he could be granted parole is 67. That is a sentence without hope.
Dawn’s oral argument is part of a series of arguments in the N.C. Supreme Court on November 10 regarding the constitutionality of Juvenile Life Without Parole (JLWOP) sentences. The United States of America is the only country in the world that continues to sentence children to such extreme sentences — and unsurprisingly, it does so in an extremely racially-disparate way. For instance, over ninety percent of children sentenced to LWOP in North Carolina are Black children.
Tune in to hear Dawn’s oral argument on Wednesday, November 10, 2021 at 10:45 a.m.